Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell

have turned their attention to the even more intensified, amped up production of celebrities, while others have explored the more individual, psychological explanations for the enormous appeal of celebrity culture. As Josh Gamson and Paul McDonald have emphasized, celebrity production is an industry—in fact, a quite elaborated one that can often look like mass production—that has relied increasingly on a growing cadre of workers: managers, talent agents, press agents, publicists, personal stylists, trainers, and the like. Both scholars see contradictory explanations for celebrity. On the one hand, it cannot be totally manufactured—its potential in a person can be spotted and nurtured, based on hard work, talent, and charisma, but not just anyone can become a star. On the other hand, fame is obviously manufactured, the stars’ images tightly controlled, and, as we have learned through reality TV, almost anyone can indeed become famous. In fact, these are the two stories about fame today, that it is earned and related to achievement and talent and yet that it is cynically produced through public relations and publicity that churn out the worthy and unworthy alike.34 Of course, there is truth to both of these stories.

      Both Gamson and McDonald trace this escalated production of celebrities to the collapse of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s when television made significant inroads into movie attendance. In Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, most stars were bound to one of the five major studios, which, for the most part, produced and owned the stars. With the erosion of the studios’ power, stars had to become “‘proprietors of their own image,’” which meant, in part, mastering the image of being unique and apart from the crowd while also, of course, being “just like us.”35 Thus, the need in the 1950s, and beyond, for agents, managers, publicists, and the like to manage image control, with celebrity production becoming an increasingly elaborated and extensive business.

      In the 1970s, with the success of People magazine and its imitators, and a growing number of television shows profiling famous people, especially movie, television, and singing stars, the industrial production of celebrities ramped up even further. By September 1981, the first movie actor to become president would be shot by John Hinckley Jr., who was bizarrely trying to impress another celebrity, Jodie Foster, while a new, syndicated TV show Entertainment Tonight premiered. Americans began to get a sense that celebrity culture was assuming a much more commanding role in their culture. By the late 1980s, when Dan Rather included accounts of problems in the marriage of Robin Givens and boxer Mike Tyson on CBS Nightly News, we knew we had come a long way from Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America” who had steered the country through the John F. Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. When Britney Spears shaved her head in February 2007 it was a lead story for two days on CNN, “the most trusted name in news.”

      New networks and cable channels were emerging to challenge the big three—ABC, NBC and CBS—on TV. As the “national market” gave way to market segmentation and niche marketing, competition for viewers increased. Channels needed to “brand” themselves, and to produce shows that would attract specific demographic niches of interest to advertisers. Cooking channels produced “celebrity chefs,” while channels on finance and investing produced celebrity financial advisers and celebrity CEOs. And with the rise of twenty-four-hour cable news channels and their ever-needy news holes to fill, celebrity scandals, crimes and trials, or crimes and trials that turned unknowns into celebrities, further broke down what was once a solid wall between “the news” and entertainment. Because the problem now was there weren’t enough celebrities—true “A-list” actors or rock stars and the like to fill the need for all this programming. Reality TV, which had the advantage of being very cheap to produce compared to scripted programming, could get and hold an audience and produce its own celebrities.

      The radiation of the tentacles of celebrity culture has been driven further by the media consolidation of the 1980s and beyond, as the octopi conglomerates have bought up publishing houses, news outlets, movie theaters, production studios, amusement parks, record companies, television stations, cable systems, and the like and insisted on “synergy” and maximum profits from them all. And twenty-four-hour cable television, with all its competing, insatiable programs, needs to be constantly fed; celebrities are the fodder. New profit-maximizing alliances within these media behemoths mean that all kinds of cross-promotions can be launched that seem utterly natural or spontaneous when they are anything but. Thus, the winner of CBS’s Survivor was immediately booked on CBS’s Late Night with David Letterman, those “fired” by Donald Trump on NBC’s The Apprentice ended up on The Today Show, and so forth. A story in Time-Warner’s People can also serve as a story or interview on Time-Warner’s CNN. When The Bachelor was launched on ABC in 2002, the network’s parent company Disney also had a 50 percent stake in Us Weekly. Thus, the magazine played a central role in promoting the show, its contestants, and the drama among them, turning many of them into celebrities, however briefly. (Wenner media, which also publishes Rolling Stone, bought back Disney’s stake in 2006.) Each media mastodon has multiple ways—and a pressing need—to promote its own celebrities, adding to the glut. Of paramount importance is ratings, sales, buzz, profits. Celebrities, whether adored or reviled, triumphant or mired in the tar pits of scandal, deliver these.

      Thus we began to get what Gamson has called “industrialized celebrity production.” Along with it, there has been a kind of democratization of fame. And what comes with such proliferating opportunities is an increased desire among many to gain the spotlight, however briefly. With this kind of fame, merit and talent no longer mattered particularly. People, as the cliché goes, became famous for being famous. As David Schmid has noted, there has been something of a collapse of the difference between fame and notoriety. “Recognition and self-exposure,” he rightly observed, “are now believed to be absolute goods in themselves.”36 Ironically, while “it has never seemed easier to be famous just for being you, and possibly get rich in the process,” as Karen Sternheimer writes, “the gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of Americans has widened and wages remain stagnant.”37 So the desire to get on a reality TV show, or to promote yourself as a YouTube star or Instagram influencer, may be even more intensified in such an unequal economy.

      Celebrity culture is then, in the twenty-first century, the result of an intricate, interconnected, and many-faceted industry targeted especially, although hardly exclusively, to younger people, especially women age 18–34.38 Celebrities are, or become, commodities used to attract us—consumers—to TV shows, movies, concerts, magazines, and the like. So they—their very identities—have to be marketed and have to fill certain market niches. They thus “operate as sources of capital” for various branches of the entertainment industry, as Paul McDonald notes, and “form a point of intersection between meaning and money.”39 Through various attention-getting devices—a breakout performance or outrageous behavior, backstories about adversity and crisis—the star first has to gain symbolic value as someone who appeals to people. Here they need to seem above us, yet we also need to identify with them, and they need to be seen as distinct, branded personalities—Sandra Bullock needs to be seen as different from Reese Witherspoon, for example. These specific traits—hair color and facial features, but also speech patterns, modes of behavior, how they present themselves, and stories about their rise to the top—if appealing to enough people combine to create their symbolic value as admirable individuals. As that symbolic value increases through publicity and marketing, the celebrity begins to gain economic value, which is the real mark of success.40 And, of course, when their symbolic value declines—the “has-been,” the “where-are-they-now” former celebrities, those who are caught in scandals or do or say offensive things, as Mel Gibson did—so does their economic value.

      While certain celebrities remain stars for much of their lives, mostly because of their talent and achievements, but also because of very shrewd marketing and PR decisions, many others are “one-hit wonders,” or flash-in-the-pan child or reality TV stars, or were stars of formerly very popular television shows that have long been off the air. Thus, there is a pressing industrial need, especially in our overheated and highly competitive media market, to constantly find and produce new celebrities. Indeed, our contemporary media economy seems increasingly fixated on creating, promoting, and capitalizing on famous figures who, in turn, give audiences cause to turn on, tune in, and link up with a rapidly expanding array of media technologies.

      Celebrity Culture and Neoliberalism